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About Michael J. Miller

Miller, who was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine from 1991 to 2005, authors this blog for PC Magazine to share his thoughts on PC-related products. No investment advice is offered in this blog. All duties are disclaimed. Miller works separately for a private investment firm which may at any time invest in companies whose products are discussed in this blog, and no disclosure of securities transactions will be made.

InterOp: Handling Growing Networks

As I look at the booths and talk to the various vendors at InterOp,
one thing that keeps impressing me is the amazing growth in demand that
is driving capacity needs in all segments of the networking world. Trends such as enterprise video, telepresence, cloud computing, and
virtual hosted desktops are putting an increasing demand on corporate
networks. The show seemed more crowded than it has been in the last couple years, with
the usual emphasis on network traffic, WAN acceleration,
security and the other traditional networking functions from companies including F5, Riverbed, and Bluecoat.

HP is the dominant presence this year, with the largest booth at the entrance and another large booth resulting from the company's recent acquisition of 3Com. HP's CTO for networking, Paul Congdon, spoke on how the firm is merging the two companies. He pointed out that the company is focused on flexibility, using the same components to let different organizations control different parts of the network. And he said the trend at the moment was clearly toward consolidation and "converged infrastructures," making it easier for large companies to build their own clouds.

Avaya was also there, talking about its "converged networks" coming from its recent acquisition of Nortel Enterprise Systems, with new core routers and switches. In his keynote speech, Avaya's CEO talked about the 4.9 billion bits the company served during the Winter Olympics, but that number seemed low to me, so I checked. The number is mostly accounting for accreditation, timing, and security applications; it doesn't include the video coverage of the servers during the games, which is probably much higher.

More after the jump.

Other big vendors had relatively muted presences at the show.

Cisco had a somewhat smaller booth than others but was still showing off a huge array of products, incuding its unifed computing system and "borderless" networking initiative, with what it called Data Center 3.0 Cisco, along with a number of other firms, is now talking about managing wired and wireless networks together.

BM surprisingly had only a small booth. It showed its cloud computing services, with no hardware at all. And Juniper was missing entirely.

Yet the number of vendors kept growing. I was surprised at the breadth of D-Link's offerings, which now include such high-end offerings as core routers, data center chassis, storage, and IP surveillance products: a big enterprise push from a company I had long associated with consumer and small business networking.

Companies such as Extreme Networks were showing pushing 40Gb switches, though most of these still seem to be a ways off from actually being sold to mainstream customers. Interestingly, I heard several customers talking about skipping 40Gb and moving straight to 100Gb.

Taking this to the high end, one of the most impressive products at the show was Arista's 7500 series data switch, which offers 384 10Gb Ethernet ports and a total fabric capacity of 10 terabits per second. This is a very high-end product, of course, and company chairman Andy Bechtolsheim told me it is targeted at financial services firms, Web and cloud service providers, and high-performance computing.

The product just announced last week, joins the company's smaller high-performance 1U units. The company claims 5 times the performance, 1/10 the power draw, and half the footprint of competing technologies. It's clearly not aimed at mainstream companies now, but it points the direction that networking is going.

For sheer number of ports, I was impressed by Force10's ExaScale core router, which can handle up to 1,260 Gigabit Ethernet ports of 560 10Gb ports (140 at line-rate). It's a data-center product, part of a line of impressive routers.

On the software front, everyone seemed to be talking network management and virtualization. Both Citirix and VMware were pushing desktop virtualization, with Xen Desktop and VMware View, respectively.

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